


3145 (all things, in time, rise)

by StarHost



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Anxiety, Character Study, Gen, Introspection, Mindfulness Techniques, Post-Canon, in which peni is a mix of both her movie and her comics personalies, in which sp//dr is both the name of the suit and the name of the spider, in which the last time the authour wrote it was 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-07
Updated: 2019-04-07
Packaged: 2020-01-06 06:04:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18382472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarHost/pseuds/StarHost
Summary: It's 3145.She lives in the future, for fucks sake. She should have this problem fixed by now.





	3145 (all things, in time, rise)

She has to make a choice. Family or bot.

 

She knows if left to her own devices she'd pick both, throwing herself into multitasking with the reckless abandon of someone far too comfortable being spread far too thin. It's a usual rapport, in a way; her hyperfocus splits so cleanly into branching paths it's as if her attention is laser-cut. On the one hand, the hole left from the destruction of her exoskeleton hits deep. SP//dr is -- was -- _had been_ \-- one of her closest friends, likely one of her only friends if she sat to dwell on the matter, and the absence of its shell hits them both hard. On the other, SP//dr isn't her only friend anymore.

It's 3145. The collider ate up only a few days for her dimension - time seems to flow near-similar between miles' world and her own, she notes automatically, about to dive into a mental analysis of dimensional time progression before blinking back to her initial train of thought.  It's 3145 and she is not alone. There are people out there just like her, people that resonate with the erratic wavelength of her own brain in a way she'd thought she'd never feel. People so contrasting in their differences it makes their similarities that much stronger, people who - despite the odds, or maybe _because_ of them - came together over the course of mere days to forge a bond so strong not even the separation of dimensions could threaten to tear it apart.

They’re her family now. The notion first settled in with the scent of rain, nose pressed into the collar of Noir’s coat as he carried her up to the collider’s ceiling. Looking between them all centered around Miles - huddled but _proud_ , carving the thinnest slice of respite out of the storm swirling around them, a momentary eye - she felt affection overcome her, spider sense brushing against 5 others, different yet the same; shifting, buzzing, circling around each other, then melding comfortably into one. For those last few moments before she’d let herself drop, it was as if their heartbeats had synchronized, and each unique face of the multiverse had wrapped her up in an all-encompassing hug.  

She wants to see them again. She wants to **_see_ ** them again, _why can't she just--_

She pulls at her hair sharply, jaw tight as a throb lances through her brain. The monitor in her hands sparks at a loose wire, and she almost throws it at a wall.

 

It's 3145. She lives in the future, for fucks sake. She should have this problem fixed by now.  

 

 

Portals aren't theoretical, in her universe, exactly. She rides in a mech controlled by the will of a sentient spider after all. The idea isn't far fetched. It's just. The farthest her New York has come on that front are heavy, luxury devices that open rifts to other heavy, luxury devices, wide enough to send a cup of coffee or a stack of documents from Japan to Antarctica  without stepping outside. They're small little tears in reality, heavily monitored and highly regulated, just breaking into the market at a price-point with an almost unbelievable amount of zeroes. It's not that the idea of portal-driven transportation is impossible, oh no. It's here and pushing forward as most technology does, working itself out.

It's just... not enough. The machines can only operate from point to point in her _own_ reality. They know just enough about their own universe to begin to manipulate it. Other universes? Other _dimensions_? There's where the problem lies.

Her New York has been trying to prove the existence of multiple dimensions for years, never being able to find a source of funding that would willingly attach their name to experimentation lest they fail. The stakes just seemed so _high_ , and with the cost it took to keep her and SP//dr around, to clean up colateral, keep the city from falling apart when the next villain of the week came through, well. She supposes it isn’t something at the top of anybody's checklist.   

There wasn't even any solid _math_ here. If she was going to make a version of Doc Ock's collider that **_really_ ** worked ( _portable, reliable, no black holes under Brooklyn, with a surefire way to select a dimension to travel to instead of being sucked in against your will - and oh god she'd have to account for everyone's atoms deteriorating, find a way to stop the glitching before they're all a mess of mangled cellular garbage on the floor what if they try to come through and they die what if she_ **_kills_ ** _them--_ ) she'd have to start from scratch. If only she'd been able to salvage some of that data; for a few brief hours it had all been right **_there_ ** in her hands, the codes, the research materials, the scans of the collider, if SP//dr hadn't gotten destroyed, _why couldn't she stop SP//dr from being destroyed--_

 

A soft hum fills her head, reverberations sending a buzz through her inner ear, cutting through. The sensation inserts itself, almost gently, into the aggravated static; slow and practiced and methodical, and with a few slow coaxes it's as if the speed of her internal frustrations shift, a radio station coming into focus in-between channels. Her head doesn't clear exactly; the static is simply tuned to a different frequency, matching the buzz in slow pulses until her thoughts stop their tumbling against her skull. Her frantic spiral pauses in this moment, resting loosely inside her brain, still weighty, but… still. Things come back into a focus she hadn't realized she'd lost.

The muscles at the base of her skull relax.  

There's the slightest of tickles at her hand, and as she glances down SP//dr comes into view, two little legs ever so softly resting against her skin. Her friend looks up at her, tiny eyes searching, and the hum in her head repeats a little more strongly.

"Thank you." She says.

The spider bows and starts to crawl slowly backwards, giving her the desk again.

"Wait, please,"

Peni scrunches up her brows, touching an ear to her shoulder as her gaze flickers, undercurrent visible below the surface of her eyes. She quickly looks from the spider to the edge of the desk and back, tongue against teeth.

Instead of continuing verbally she reaches out, one aura of thought brushing against another, and a suggestion of feeling passes from her to her friend. She asks, gentle, without pressure, and the spider responds on her wavelength, matching her soft request with a swell of affection that makes her smile.

She reaches out, index finger extending just enough to give spot for the creature to climb, and with a steady shift she leans back in her seat, head ceilingward, raising her arm off the table to gently place SP//dr on her face. She closes her eyes and mouth, and relaxes her body as her senses shift to the feeling of legs against her skin. 

Both spiders breathe in time - a deep nasal inhale from Peni - and her friend sets to its routine, scurrying down to her chin before placing itself carefully, starting back upwards with purpose. It's steps as it begins shift from clustered to calculated, and it makes sure that each of its appendages move separate from each other; the space between each step just large enough to be able to zero in on, the sensation of each individual leg. SP//dr knows Peni registers the contact, and it methodically seems to retrace invisible paths across her face.

Peni is thankful for this. As the spider moves she tries to slow her thoughts down to match time with each step, coaxing the muscles in her body to relax and droop, hands falling open, shoulders sagging down. This isn't the first time they've done this, the two of them, and it's been in practice long enough for her to know what to do without having to reach out for secondary confirmation. She mentally visits each section of her body with every inhale, and exhales out the tension, allows thoughts to form and pass through her mind, and lets them gently go. They ebb out through her breaths, turning the clotted frustration in her skull to the widest of estuaries, static meeting the sea.

In her mind's eye she can see her worries, ever present, ever valid, but the placement of them ripples and shifts, everything moved into a slightly different perspective. _If_ crests into _when, maybe_ fades into _one day_ , and the biggest knot, the looming mess of tangles and tension before her - _fixing her robot, seeing her_ ** _family_** _again_ \- loosens, falling apart with each step SP//dr takes until the tangles become footholds, and an impossible obstacle morphs into a gently sloping set of steps.

Her head does clear this time. And as SP//dr ends at her forehead - a leg gently resting on each eyelid - a loving, tuneless hum reverberates gently through their space.

 

It's 3145. She is okay. She is capable. She is _here_. She'll figure it out.

 

 

Her friend gives her a mental smile, and Peni moves herself to let them both reposition. The spider crawls into her hair, and she straightens out, slowly opening her eyes. Her desk is just as she'd left it, loose robotics strewn across, a scattered array of small pieces she'd managed to pocket from SP//dr-the-mech's remains before she'd dove home. She absently palms one, rolling it in-between her fingers, familiar.

**_Fact:_ ** _These parts had travelled dimensions._ **_She_ ** _had travelled dimensions.  Okay._

**_Fact:_ ** _She misses their suit. She feels guilty for being torn like this, between rebuilding their casing or trying to reach her new friends, like she's taking SP//dr for granted, not treating them right--_

SP//dr interrupts the thought with a soft insistence. They are together, suit or no. They are together and they are no longer the only ones.

Peni blinks. 

**_Fact:_ ** _Though her suit was a part of her it doesn't define her entirety. SP//dr is right. They are more than just exoskeleton._

**_Fact:_ ** _If they can do it once, they can do it again._  

Though a new wave of determination encompasses her, her body stays loose, and with no current hyperfocus to distract itself the weight of everything settles around her. Her eyes open from an elongated blink heavy and stinging, and she realizes after a moment that she's _tired_. Her brows furrow curiously; she really hadn't noticed. How long has it been?

SP//dr taps at her forehead from its nest in her hair. _Too long_.

Peni snorts - a muffled thing - and shifts, rubbing one eye before standing, muscles creaking at her joints. She raises a wrist with a watch attached, tapping into a program that dims the lights in the space, and swipes the screen over to check the time. It's well past 2 in the morning. Yikes.

The spider hums to her the feeling of soft linen that Peni acknowledges, and responds with her own affirmation. She's going, she's going.

Making her way over to a corner of the room she nudges mess aside, clearing loose wiring away from a small, single bed, sheets patterned with napping cats in their pyjamas. She opts to skip her nightly routine as the exhaustion really hits, barely leaving her with the strength to pull the sheets back before sliding in, head finding pillow with a quiet thunk. SP//dr scurries to her exposed side in a momentary panic, nearly squashed from the motion, and sends a zigzag to her that she responds to with an already half-asleep apology. In another moment she'll be out cold, spider finding its own perch to rest in the machinery beside, and as she slips away she sees the smiling, encouraging faces of her new family from their homes across the multiverse.

_See you soon._ She thinks, and she is gone.

 

 

It's 3145.

 

It will still be 3145 when she wakes up.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't expect Peni Parker to be the reason I churned something out for the first time in 4 years, but here we are. Her character has a lot of potential, a lot of implications to work with. I'm sure the collider event was too much for any of the spider-gang to properly process until later, and I really started thinking about it with her. How would she handle it? What would have been going through her brain?
> 
> Mid-way through writing this, an idea for a whole series of one-shots formed in my head, but I think I may be getting too ahead of myself and my own capabilities. If something more comes from this, then yay! We'll have to see. Writing takes a lot out of me, its really fun but just. Tiring. 
> 
>  
> 
> Apologies on the rust, and thanks for reading.


End file.
